Our World 2.0 - Webzine for Biodiversity, Climate Change

Brendan Barrett, CEC member and programme officer at the United Nations University, explains how the online magazine 'Our World 2.0' has evolved since its launch in 2008.

Photo: Our World 2.0 / UNU

There are many online environmental magazines out there but Our World 2.0 is a bit different. For a start, it only focuses on four issues – biodiversity, climate change, peak oil and food security. What is more, it looks at how these challenges and there potential solutions are interconnected. This is often overlooked, as we saw when the response to high oil prices at the end of 2008 resulted in the rush into biofuels, which in turn affected food security and undermined biodiversity conservation efforts.

Our World 2.0 was launched at the time of the July 2008 G8 summit in Japan and includes short articles and video briefs. The videos have proven to be very attractive, with over one million viewers in the past year on YouTube.

The other interesting aspect of Our World 2.0 is the extensive interaction that takes place with the reader community with 1,050 comments on articles, 2,780 people following on Twitter and another 1,880 on Facebook. This is still early days and the community is growing fast.

Our World 2.0 is the only UN web magazine dealing with environmental issues and is a part of the Guardian Environment Network of the best environmental sites on the web.

It also has a strong educational role with the stories utilized in various online courses by the United Nations University and its partners.